Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Businesses will have to pay for data protection services

Irish businesses will have to cough up for new data
protection officers thanks to EU laws coming down the tracks, according to the
Irish data protection commissioner.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Helen Dixon said
that the General Data Protection Regulation will be a "wake up call"
for Irish organisations which do not currently have such facilities in place

Ms Dixon
said that dozens of foreign-based tech companies had recently been in touch
with her office over data compliance responsibilities after a potential move to
Ireland.

The GDPR is
one of a number of data and security issues to be discussed at Dublin InfoSec
2016 today. The RDS conference, which includes talks by Wikileaks journalist
Sarah Harrison and cyber psychologist Mary Aiken, will focus on topics ranging
from how to survive being hacked to ransomware attacks and responding to data
breaches.

Breaches

The
conference is being held as news of one of the world's biggest data breaches
broke last night. Over 400 million email addresses and passwords from the
adult-themed dating network 'Adult Friend Finder' were exposed, with tens of
thousands of Irish email addresses said to be included in the breach.

Meanwhile,
Ms Dixon said that it would be a matter of months before the Irish data
regulator's office knows whether, or to what extent, Yahoo can be held
accountable for its recent data breach that affected over 500 million email
users.

"We're
in daily contact and in constant activity," she said.

"That
is the subject of significant activity for the office and is in fact a scenario
that is changing day by day in terms of the information that we're
gathering."

Last week,
Yahoo filed a document with US authorities revealing that some staff knew of
the data breach as far back as 2014. The company, which only admitted the
massive breach in September of this year, has claimed that the meltdown was
caused by state-sponsored hackers.